Contrary to the widely held notion that war photography is a male preserve, there is a long history of women photographers working in war zones. Just like their male colleagues, they have documented crises worldwide and played a decisive role in shaping our image of war. As opposed to their male counterparts, women photographers often gained unrestricted access to families in their homes, of whom they took particularly emotional portraits. What is more, they worked at the front lines and took pictures of war victims that do not spare the viewer.

The exhibition presents around 140 works by eight women photographers from the past eighty years, among them Carolyn Cole (*1961), Françoise Demulder (1947–2008), Catherine Leroy (1944–2006), Susan Meiselas (*1948), Lee Miller (1907–1977), Anja Niedringhaus (1965–2014), Christine Spengler (*1945) and Gerda Taro (1910–1937). The photographers, whose subjects range from the European conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s to recent wars around the globe, employ a variety of photographic styles and strategies and tell their stories in many different ways, switching from neutral objectivity to raw directness or sympathetic engagement and empathy. They include intimate glimpses of daily life in wartime as well as evidence of shocking atrocities or illustrations of war’s absurdity and its dire consequences.